I only need book, which source code I saved from here: http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/chess/ (As far as I know gnuchess 6.1.1 doesn`t contain book by itself)Then I moved the gz-file to the gnuchess folder and extracted there.

I don'tknow much about GNU Chess 6. I thought it was a re-branded Fruit, combined with Polyglot into one binary. Fruit does use books in Polyglot format, and Polyglot can use these too. What format has the book that you downloaded? Is that a PGN file? If so, I suppose you have to follow the instructions given in the GNU Chess docs to convert it to bin.

Note that XBoard can also use Polyglot books as GUI book. You should enable and specify the (.bin) book file in the Common Engine Options dialog, and untick that the engine has an own book, to make XBoard use the GUI book on its behalf.

There is another issue though. I think GNUChess is default engine in xboard and when I type xboard -fcp 'gnuchess --xboard' system opens xboard with GNUChess. I don`t know if the GNUChess source I compiled has anything to do with my current GNUChess engine with xboard.

If I want to use my self-compiled GNUChess how? It is important to be able to use source-compiled engines with xboard. The book is also not working in my current GNUChess engine. Now it should be in bin format?

If you did "sudo make install" then the GNU Chess you compiled should have become the default GNU Chess on your system. It is not really true that this replaced the original GNU Chess. Debian uses the convention that binary packages from the repositories are in installed in /usr (in this case /usr/games/guchess), while software you compile from source is installed in /usr/local (in this case /usr/local/games/gnuchess). But because /usr/local/games is in your shell's search path before /usr/games, the things you installed from source 'eclipse' the corresponding files that came with the distro. So as long as your self-compiled stuff is there, the original stuff might as well have been deleted. But when you remove your self-compiled stuff, the original stuff becomes active again.

This only holds if you installed, because only 'make install' ill move the binaries and their data files to the place where they belong. If you topped at 'make', the gnuchess binary will still sit in the directory here you 'maked' it. Typing 'gnuchess' at the command prompt (and also when XBoard issues it) would then invoke the original version of GNU Chess, as /usr/games is searched before the current directory, and the latter is only searched when you would type ./gnuchess. (And if you are no longer in the directory where gnuchess is, it could not be found at all, unless you specify the path to it.)

Note that not all engines might be compliant with these conventions, but since GNU Chess is coming from the Ubuntu repositories, I suppose it is. (But be careful with engines that are basically just hacked Windows versions; they are often made by people that don't know where one should put files on Linux, and could put them in the strangest places.)

I don't know what you have to do to make GNU Chess use its own book, and where it looks for it by default. (One would expect something like /usr/local/share/games/gnuchess/*.bin .) As I said, I never used GNU Chess 6.

Note that the default engine of XBoard is not gnuchess, but fairymax. But this merely means that giving a plain "xboard"command is the same as typing "xboard -fcp fairymax -scp fairymax". XBoard only knows the default engine by name, and issues that name a a command, not making any attempt to control what the system does with it. So it is not like XBoard has some secret path to the default engine that would make it use anything else than what you would get when you typed 'fairymax' at the command prompt in a terminal window.

[/quote]Indeed, that could be it. Note you have the choice to specify a book in the Polyglot section (in which case the built-in Polyglot would use it), or in the [Engine] section (where Fruit would use it itself).

I determined the full path to GNUChess executable. Now I should have GNUChess which I built from source?

The book is also not yet working.

Book

Default: false

Indicates whether the adapter should use a book. This has no effect on the engine own book (which can be controlled with the UCI option OwnBook in the [Engine] section). In particular, it is possible to use both a PolyGlot book and an engine book. In that case, the engine book will be used whenever PolyGlot is out of book. Remember that PolyGlot is unaware of whether the engine is itself using a book or not.

Now I have the settings as follows in the ini file:

Book = trueBookFile = smallbook.bin

[Engine]

# standard UCI options

Hash = 256 # in MB

NalimovCache = 16 # in MB

OwnBook = true # false for no book (e.g. Nunn-like matches) I changed false to true now it should work regarding smallbook.bin exists (it does in src folder) but it doesn`t workBookFile = smallbook.bin

I think the problem is that GNU Chess (both its engine and Polyglot component) interprets the file name you give for the book relative to the current directory. And that is apparently not where it is, considering the fact that you have to specify a long path name for the binary.

So you either must also give a path name for the book files, or make sure that the directory where gnuchess and smallbook.bin are located is the current directory. The latter you can do by first go there and only then start XBoard:

Now that you have run ./configure, it will have created a new Makefile for you. And when you run make/install it will create and install a new XBoard according to the instructions in there. (Which now will include zippy in the build). You should delete all *.o files first, though, because although make is smart enough to recompile when the corresponding .c file was changed, I don't think it is smart enough to recompile when the Makefile has changed (and other compile commands might thus now be specified to generate the binaries from the source).

So:

rm *.omakesudo make install

This should give you the zippy-enabled XBoard as default XBoard (i.e. the one that will be fired up when you give the xboard command from the command prompts)..